5 Creepy and Cool Things Del Toro Told Us About Crimson Peak

The second trailer for Crimson Peak has arrived and we recently spoke with its director Guillermo Del Toro about how his latest ghost story, which as he reveals is much more than just a ghost story. He also tells us his biggest inspiration, his favourite ghost stories, and why he's not a big believer in ambiguity.

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1. Crimson Peak's Ghosts Are Colour-Coded Red for a Reason

There's something different about Crimson Peak's ghosts, something strange which sets them slightly apart from most of spectres you've seen on the silver screen. It isn't just some random stylistic decision to make them stand out, it's Del Toro doing what he always does, tapping into a rich tradition that for most people will remain unseen and unappreciated. And if it's ghosts you're interested in, there's no better source for inspiration than the great antiquarian and master of the genre, M.R. James.

"I felt it was important for the ghost to be rather unique in appearance, and I chose to colour-code them in a way that has never been done before. There is a story... after M.R. James died, they found some papers of his and one of them was a sketch for a story that seemed to scholars to be quite autobiographical because the setting reminded them of a childhood property of his parents. And in it, he said he saw a ghost behind a little wooden door – and it’s the only time he didn’t describe them like crumpled linen, as he did in Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad or as featureless thing, as he did often – he described a ghost with features which while seemingly human were of a bright pink colour. That struck me very strongly."

The story Del Toro is referring to is "A Vignette", and here's the specific passage he's on about:

"I made progress until I was within range of the gate and the hole. Things were, alas! worse than I had feared; through that hole a face was looking my way. It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows." – M.R. James, "A Vignette" (1936)

M.R. James

M.R. James created the weirdest, most unusual, and disturbing ghosts. He has no interest in the idea of a melancholic spirit, desiring forgiveness; his ghosts have hairy arms, spider's webs instead of eyes, and slimy tentacles searching in the dark. They're nasty creations.

Horror always attracts critics lightly-versed in psychoanalysis, so it's perhaps unsurprising that James's peculiar ghosts, coupled with his lifelong status as a bachelor, have invited much interpretation: he was terrified of intimacy; he was a 'non-practising homosexual'; he was asexual. The passage above – again, unsurprisingly – is often cited in these readings – and containing the words "pink" and "hot", of course it does.

Del Toro is incredibly well-versed in the tradition of which he is now a dominant contributor. All of those sexual echoes are being carried into Crimson Peak, where the ghosts are always accompanied by a dark, almost blood red tinge. And to perhaps conceal some of these connotations, Del Toro is providing a rational explanation for why the dead are stained red.

"The ghosts are buried in the clay," he tells me, "like the bog people in The Mummy, and I thought it would be interesting to treat them in the same colour as the clay under the house which is a bright crimson. The house is built over clay mines, and the clay is a bright red. They are visually coded and the only red in the entire movie. Everyone who has a bit of red has something to do with the ghosts. The rest of the movie does not have that colour at all."

Jessica Chastain's Lady Lucille Sharpe wears a crimson dress.

2. What Are Del Toro's Favourite Ghost Stories?

"My love of horror is as strong in literature as it is in film," he tells me. He also reveals he has an entire library full of horror books, with shelves dedicated to the unappreciated greats, like Algernon Blackwood and Sheridan Le Fanu.

"I love everything from M.R. James to Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Wharton, Oliver Onions, Francis Marion Crawford. It would be a list of hundreds. It depends on what you’re seeking. Le Fanu is really good at creating ghosts that have a certain malignancy and an incredibly tangible moral effect. M.R. James is a guy that seduces you with incredible scholarly data and his ghosts are always a) ambiguous, b) evil, and in some instances his creatures are vaguely reminiscent of sexual repulsion. He was not a very social man."

So many ghost stories love to flirt with the fantastic, to show you manifestly supernatural events, but they also love to undermine their validity through drunken narrators, elaborate framing devices, and of course, if you're in need of sobering materialism, there's always the man of science. Del Toro holds dear those stories which play this game.

Edith Wharton

"I love Edith Wharton, because very much like Henry James, she can play things ambiguously even to the point of being cryptical. That’s why my main character in Crimson Peak is called Edith, because of Edith Wharton.

"And then, Henry James wrote one of my favourite ghost stories – not the one everybody knows – but it’s called The Friend of My Friends."

James probably wrote the most famously ambiguous ghost story of them all, The Turn of the Screw, and plays an equally elaborate game with narrators and the truth in The Friend of My Friends. Is Del Toro hinting that Crimson Peak will also tap into this tradition?

Well, the answer's a big, defiant no...

3. Forget Ambiguity, Crimson Peak's Ghosts Are Really Ghosts

"No, it’s completely manifest. There’s even an attempt early on by the characters to rationalise ghosts. But for me, I’m a guy that wants to… I always show you the monster. I always want things to be up front. I want to show the faun, the kaiju, and ghost in the Devil’s Backbone.

“

The scariest things in my stories are the humans. That’s not very much in vogue."

"Because in my belief, the scariest things in my stories are the humans. That’s not very much in vogue.

"The main way to scare people is to take a moral or Judeo-Christian point of view and imbue the ghosts with moral evil or a pure dichotomy evil – you say someone was a satan worshipper or somebody was just evil and depraved. I don't want to do this.

"I go very counter to the culture of ghost stories. I just want the ghosts to be, and then make it a creepy movie, rather than one based on scares. Make it an atmospheric movie, which is creepy, yes, but the more you attend to the story the more you're hopefully invested in the human characters – good or evil – and the more the ghosts become a palpable threat.

The Devil's Backbone (2001)

"I think I did it in Devil's Backbone, which is still one of my favourite movies I've done, and I hope we've pulled off something similar here. It's a very different movie, but it's similar in certain ways."

And there also real in a different way. While augmented by CGI, the ghosts are played by actors throughout production. "I knew I wanted an actor on set in front of my other actors, so they're based on an actor in make-up on the set. I didn't want to do a double-pass, so I shot them on locations that were geographically easy to replicate – a corridor, a small room – so when we were at digital effects it was easy to add a little bit of translucency."

4. You Might Not Notice It But Technology Is Pretty Important

The advent of technology is sometimes used in ghost stories to dispel the superstitions of an early age. It literally brings light to where there only previously dark, and it's something Del Toro is weaving into the background of Crimson Peak.

"It’s not thematically salient in the movie, but I wanted to tell the story right at the beginning of the electrical age," he says. "I wanted to have a girl [Edith] that was unique in America, because she believes in ghosts and loves ghosts when everybody else doesn’t.

Edith Cushing and Dr. Alan McMichael.

"The soundtrack of the movie is constantly drowned by tramways, steam locomotives, horns. You see Buffalo, New York right just as it's hosted the World’s Fair, and has been named the most electrified city in the world. They were transitioning from gas lamps to electrical bulbs, but Edith is unique because she is connected to the world of the past. On the other hand, Tom Hiddleston's character – Sir Thomas Sharpe – lives in a world that is Victorian and Medieval and steeped in ancient, crumbling lore yet he’s delivering modernity.

Building the future.

"He wants the machine, he wants to build a machine, he wants to build a future. And then all these things become thematically relevant to the movie, because in a very self-evident way in the movie, the ghosts are the past. The ghosts are the things that can alter the present."

It sounds pretty thematically important, but Del Toro in typical fashion downplays it all: "I thought it would be nice to do it through modernity and the machine age. It’s just interesting to me, and nobody needs to understand these things to enjoy the movie."

5. Crimson Peak Is More Gothic Romance Than Horror

At the centre of gothic literature stands the house: looming, dark, sinister. Gothic mansions and castles are more than just bricks and mortar; they're seats of ancestral wealth and guilt, living repositories of historical pain, and they're labyrinths hiding terrible secrets. And Del Toro is making sure Allerdale Hall connects more closely with its Gothic heritage, rather than just another haunted mansion.

Del Toro's Gothic house, Allerdale Hall.

"We drew very much on the idea the house is really full of absence, full of empty corridors, human life. We create shapes that look human in corridors or painted in the walls, but only two people live in it. It’s haunted by the past, and the past is what’s destroying the characters. The idea the family was once very wealthy, once very prominent, and now they’re not.

Cover art from a paperback edition of Le Fanu's Uncle Silas.

"It’s not so much things that go bump in the night in the normal haunted house [...] this isn’t a horror movie but a Gothic romance. It is sort of a hybrid of many impulses that were boiling in that era – sexual tension, romantic tension – and the fight between the rational and supernatural. So I would say Uncle Silas [by Sheridan Le Fanu] would be closer to it. It would also be closer to Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, the Dragonwyck. All these stories that seem to be of another time. But I wanted to give it a couple of scares and a couple of violent moments and sexual moments that are of now, so it’s not an artefact or a curiosity.

Consider Tom Hiddleston's character, Sir Thomas Sharpe, for a moment: in Del Toro's own words, he's a man caught between the past and future, one foot in the Victorian and the Medieval, in "ancient, crumbling lore", yet determined to build the future. It's hard not to see Del Toro. In fact, once you start, it's impossible to not see him everywhere. Edith adores the past and its ghosts, and even Charlie Hunnam's character – the doctor, the cool man of science – can be seen pointing a camera towards a screen in a dimly-lit room. But unlike Sir Thomas Sharpe, Del Toro isn't bound by the past; he's inspired by it, and engages with the ghosts of M.R. James, Le Fanu, and Wharton in the hope of creating something startling and new.

Daniel is IGN's Games Editor over in London. He writes about movies, too. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.